This month I’m working on several writing projects: an essay on Western attitudes towards trees and forests, which will be published in the Cambridge History of Literature and Environment; a book on Literature, Ecology, and Indigenous Rights (under contract with McGill-Queen’s University Press); and a collection of essays titled Transatlantic Literary Ecologies, which I’m co-editing with my friend John Miller of the University of Sheffield in England. On the music front, I’m currently working on three new songs for my next CD project. I took a forty-minute break from writing this afternoon to go skating on the frozen surface of Ness Lake, but soon I’ll be leaving the ice behind. Looking for sunshine and inspiration, I’ll be heading back to Oahu, Hawaii, for a holiday later this month. The last time I was there, I wrote a song called “Likelike Highway,” one of the best tracks on Shadows in the Light. I’m hoping the muse will smile on me again during my visit. It would be nice to come home not only with some sunshine-induced vitamin D to tide me through the rest of the winter here in northern British Columbia, but another new song as well. To that end, I’m gonna buy myself a ukelele in Waikiki and take it to the beach…